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The Rev. Frank Logue
The Christmas Sermon – A Play Narrator: There are some worship services which, as far as the sermon is concerned, are bulletproof. You can not ruin them even with a bad preacher. A wedding is an example of this. Easter and Christmas are two more. After all, on a Christmas Eve night light this, gathered by candlelight, singing familiar carols, hearing the story from Luke’s Gospel told and then receiving communion are enough. Nothing more really needs to be said. Yet, the preacher takes to the pulpit. Preachers often miss the mark, but sometimes God gets through anyway. Tonight we will hear not just the preacher’s sermon, but what some in the congregation hear as well: Preacher: We gather this evening separated by the centuries from that holy night in Bethlehem. Our wants and needs are so different today. On that silent night long ago, Mary and Joseph entered Bethlehem alone, while tonight we gather with our families gathered round about us in our pew. Even in a hard year like this one, we are still blessed with great wealth compared to most of the world, while they arrived poor and homeless. We have one another. They were so alone. Mother: “Families gathered round us.” Family gathered around my neck, on my lap. Does he know how hard it was to get these kids dressed and to church tonight without killing them? Then they gave the boys candles. Lit candles! What were they thinking? I just wanted some peace and quiet for one hour. Now they are squirming all over the place. My husband doesn’t even seem to notice. I might have to take them out of the service. Wife: “Families gathered round us.” Really? My husband is in a submarine somewhere out under the Atlantic. My parents are in Indiana. There is no one here but me. Widower: “Entered Bethlehem alone.” Alone I understand. My wife died this past March and the kids are all so busy. They are around, but always on to the next thing. I feel so alone. Even in the middle of this church full of people. Father: “Poor and homeless.” That will be us. If my wife and I don’t find something more than minimum wage work to make up for the money I was making in real estate, we’ll be the next foreclosure. No one really knows how bad it is. I feel so alone. Wife: I feel so alone. Widower: I feel so alone. Mother: Why couldn’t I have come alone? Preacher: With few if any real wants and the companionship of family and friends we have to use our imaginations to understand what Mary and Joseph might have been going through. Widower: Oh brother! Wife: Please! Preacher: Yet imagine that feeling of entering a town where no one knows who you are and no one will welcome you in. You work to find a room and end up in a stable, with livestock for roommates in a stall long in need of cleaning. Yet, there are minor graces, hay for a pillow and a feed box for a crib. It may be a humble stable, but God is not absent here. Mother: The candles were better than this. Can’t we just get on with communion and some more carols? Now I’m just remembering how I need to clean some more before the in-laws get here tomorrow evening. Father: I think if I pay the minimum balance on the credit cards and put the car insurance on a monthly plan, I can make the mortgage payment by the 10th, then I can put the water bill check in the power bill envelope and the power bill check in the water bill envelope and send them in. That trick will work once won’t it? Maybe that will hold them for a week. By then I might have found a way to make more money. Preacher: And into this humble stable on the backside of a little town in Judea, the King of all creation is born. That God would be born in such a rough and rugged little place as this shows us something about God that we never knew before that night. No person and no place is beyond God’s love and care. No matter how forgotten that person or place seems to be. No matter how humble the place, God is there. No matter if the person is outcast, or seems left behind in the eyes of others, God is with that person. Widower: Forgotten. I wouldn’t have used that word, but it fits so painfully well. Since Roberta died, people come around now and again. My kids call and ask about me and it only points out the times in between. I do feel forgotten. Wife: Left behind. I know Chad didn’t mean to leave me behind. I’m proud of him serving in the Navy. I want to support him. I just want to make more friends here. Make more of a life for myself. Preacher: God is not absent. God still sees what is happening in all of these places, with all sorts and conditions of people. Even in the bustling town of Bethlehem, bursting at the seems with people packing in for the census, God comes in the midst of that busy-ness to Mary and Joseph right when they need God’s presence. Father: God still sees. That can’t be true. I am holding it all together as everything is unraveling before my eyes and I wonder why God isn’t blessing me anymore. Where did I go wrong? But I don’t see that I did something wrong. It’s just the economy. None of us saw it coming. I feel like God didn’t see, doesn’t see, the problems. Mother: God coming in the midst of a busy place. If God can’t come in the middle of a flurry of activity than God will never be able to come to my house at all. Preacher: We are so unlike Mary and Joseph with our lives full of people who seem blessed by God. Even in a year with the economy ailing, we are so much wealthier than the rest of the world. Narrator: The preacher droned on. Some of what he said was so contrary to the experience of the people seated before him that it would have made them mad if it wasn’t laughable. But that wasn’t when they stopped listening. The truth is he lost them. Out of a desire to take the congregation to a deeper point about the meaning of Christmas he taught about what he called Incarnational Theology and its implications for the quotidian. By then no one was listening anymore, accept perhaps his wife who was shaking her head as she had warned him that part was too much when he read her the sermon the day before. Though to be completely honest, the preacher’s wife did seem to zone out a bit in that section too. But losing your train of thought in a sermon is not always unproductive. Scattered among the people in the pews, a wife was wondering about how God was present with her when her husband was at sea; a father wondered where God might be leading him now that real estate was not doing so well, especially since his heart had never been in it to start with; a widower finally saw the few times when God had been so fully present since his wife’s death, though he hadn’t noticed it at the time; and, a mother wondered how she could feel God’s presence in the frenzied pace of raising three boys and a girl as she always put it, counting her husband as one of the boys, but not counting herself with their daughter. God is present throughout the worship service working in ways preacher’s never imagine to use the words of even a flawed sermon, or just using the time in church itself, to touch someone’s heart, to awaken a person to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. But now things started winding toward home. Some people had checked out of the sermon entirely, but our four travelers remained on their own roads, still going the direction of the preacher without knowing it. Preacher: So you see how the Incarnation infuses the quotidian. God is present through the real world, our actual times and places, our real hurts and needs. God knows your joys and sorrows, your happiness and your grief. Our needs pail in comparison to what Mary and Joseph faced that night. Yet, they trusted that God had been with them in the past, God was present with them there in Bethlehem and that God held their future. Widower: God knows my grief. Jesus understands. Wife: God has been with me in the past, there have always been times when I have really felt God’s presence. I know that’s true. Mother: God is present. I do know that. Father: God holds the future. I so want to believe that. Preacher: And that abiding presence of God in our day to day lives is the real meaning of Christmas. God did not leave us alone lost in sin and confusion. God came to us as a baby born in the most humble of circumstances. God came to us in Jesus. This is why we sometimes refer to him as Emmanuel, which means, Mother: God with us. Widower: God with us. Father: God with us. Wife: God with us. Preacher: God with us. And the miracle of miracles is that when we use or imaginations to peer into that manger, to see the creator of all that is lying so vulnerable in those bands of swaddling cloth, we know that God is with us not in power or might. God has come out of care for us and is with us in love. Amen. All: Amen. Narrator: Having heard that God was with them, our four hearers sang the songs with a little more confidence, listened to the words of communion with more attention to what they had to speak, and then each of them felt God’s presence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist revealing how God had been with them all along. By the time they greeted him at the door, their words of praise for the preacher’s sermon were heartfelt. Mother: Thank you. That sermon was just what I needed to hear after a busy month of getting ready for Christmas. God Bless You! Father: I appreciate your words tonight. I’ve been facing some tough decisions and I felt like you were speaking just to me. Wife: I came tonight feeling kind of lonely. Widower: Me too. Wife: But I’m feeling better now. I’m glad I came. I’ll have to tell Chad he missed a great sermon. Widower: He sure did! Hey, you want to grab lunch together after the noon service tomorrow. Wife: Yes, That would be nice. Thanks. I’ll see you there. Narrator: On the way home, the preacher told his wife how much people had gotten out of the sermon. Preacher: I think that was my best Christmas sermon ever. Narrator: His wife agreed that it might have been. But if he had seen the look in her eyes, he would have realized it wasn’t exactly a compliment. Amen.
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